History > U.S. History > 21st Century

The American Dream has long been a dominant theme in U.S. culture, one with enduring significance, but these are difficult times for dreamers. The editors of and contributors to The American Dream in the 21st Century examine the American Dream historically, socially, and economically and consider its intersection with politics, religion, race, gender, and generation.

The conclusions presented in this short, readable volume provide both optimism for the faith that most Americans have in the possibility of achieving the American Dream and a realistic assessment of the cracks in the dream. The last presidential election offered hope, but the experts here warn about the need for better programs and policies that could make the dream a reality for a larger number of Americans.

Extending the understanding of race and ethnicity in the South beyond the prism of black-white relations, this interdisciplinary collection explores the growth, impact, and significance of rapidly growing Asian American populations in the American South. Avoiding the usual focus on the East and West Coasts, several essays attend to the nuanced ways in which Asian Americans negotiate the dominant black and white racial binary, while others provoke readers to reconsider the supposed cultural isolation of the region, reintroducing the South within a historical web of global networks across the Caribbean, Pacific, and Atlantic.

Providing incisive commentary on the historical and contemporary American working class experience, Banded Together: Economic Democratization in the Brass Valley documents a community's efforts to rebuild and revitalize itself in the aftermath of deindustrialization. Through powerful oral histories and other primary sources, Jeremy Brecher tells the story of a group of average Americans--factory workers, housewives, parishioners, and organizers--who tried to create a democratic alternative to the economic powerlessness caused by the closing of factories in the Connecticut Naugatuck Valley region during the 1970s and 1980s. This volume focuses on grassroots organization, democratically controlled enterprises, and supportive public policies, providing examples from the Naugatuck Valley Project community alliance that remain relevant to the economic problems of today and tomorrow. Drawing on more than a hundred interviews with Project leaders, staff, and other knowledgeable members of the local community, Brecher illustrates how the Naugatuck Valley Project served as a vehicle for community members to establish greater control over their economic lives.

Military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq consumed so much attention
during his presidency that few people appreciated that George W. Bush was also an
activist on the home front. Despite limited public support, and while confronting a
deeply divided Congress, Bush engineered and implemented reforms of public policy on
a wide range of issues: taxes, education, health care, energy, environment, and
regulatory reform. In Bush on the Home Front, former Bush White House official and
academic John D. Graham analyzes Bush's successes in these areas and setbacks in
other areas such as Social Security and immigration reform. Graham provides valuable
insights into how future presidents can shape U.S. domestic policy while facing
continuing partisan polarization.

Drawing on nearly thirty years of prior analyses of growth, aging, and diversity in Texas populations and households, the authors of Changing Texas: Implications of Addressing or Ignoring the Texas Challenge examine key issues related to future Texas population change and its socioeconomic implications. Current interpretation of data indicates that, in the absence of any change in the socioeconomic conditions associated with the demographic characteristics of the fastest growing populations, Texas will become poorer and less competitive in the future. However, the authors delineate how such a future can be altered so that the “Texas Challenge” becomes a Texas advantage, leading to a more prosperous future for all Texans.

Presenting extensive data and projections for the period through 2050, Changing Texas permits an educated preview of Texas at the middle of the twenty-first century. Discussing in detail the implications of population-related change and examining how the state could alter those outcomes through public policy, Changing Texas offers important insights for the implications of Texas’ changing demographics for educational infrastructure, income and poverty, unemployment, healthcare needs, business activity, public funding, and many other topics important to the state, its leaders, and its people. Perhaps most importantly, Changing Texas shows how objective information, appropriately analyzed, can inform governmental and private-sector policies that will have important implications for the future of Texas.

The idea of the United States as a Christian nation is a powerful, seductive, and potentially destructive theme in American life, culture, and politics. Many fundamentalist and evangelical leaders routinely promote this notion, and millions of Americans simply assume the Christian character of the United States. And yet, as Richard T. Hughes reveals in this powerful book, the biblical vision of the "kingdom of God" stands at odds with the values and actions of an American empire that sanctions war instead of peace, promotes dominance and oppression instead of reconciliation, and exalts wealth and power instead of justice for the poor and needy._x000B__x000B_With conviction and careful consideration, Hughes reviews the myth of Christian America from its earliest history in the founding of the republic to the present day. With extensive analysis of both Christian scripture and American history, Hughes investigates the reasons why so many Americans think of the United States as a Christian nation. Timely and thought-provoking, Christian America and the Kingdom of God illuminates the devastating irony of a "Christian America" that so often behaves in unchristian ways.

During the height of the civil rights movement, Blacks were among the most liberal Americans. Since the 1970s, however, increasing representation in national, state, and local government has brought about a more centrist outlook among Black political leaders. Focusing on the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), Katherine Tate studies the ways in which the nation’s most prominent group of Black legislators has developed politically. Organized in 1971, the CBC set out to increase the influence of Black legislators. Indeed, over the past four decades, they have made progress toward the goal of becoming recognized players within Congress. And yet, Tate argues, their incorporation is transforming their policy preferences. Since the Clinton Administration, CBC members—the majority of whom are Democrats—have been less willing to oppose openly congressional party leaders and both Republican and Democratic presidents. Tate documents this transformation with a statistical analysis of Black roll-call votes, using the important Poole-Rosenthal scores from 1977 to 2010. While growing partisanship has affected Congress as a whole, not just minority caucuses, Tate warns that incorporation may mute the independent voice of Black political leaders.

Irene Taviss Thomson gives us a nuanced portrait of American social politics that helps explain both why we are drawn to the idea of a 'culture war' and why that misrepresents what is actually going on. ---Rhys H. Williams, Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, Loyola University Chicago "An important work showing---beneath surface conflict---a deep consensus on a number of ideals by social elites." ---John H. Evans, Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego The idea of a culture war, or wars, has existed in America since the 1960s---an underlying ideological schism in our country that is responsible for the polarizing debates on everything from the separation of church and state, to abortion, to gay marriage, to affirmative action. Irene Taviss Thomson explores this notion by analyzing hundreds of articles addressing hot-button issues over two decades from four magazines: National Review, Time, The New Republic, and The Nation, as well as a wide array of other writings and statements from a substantial number of public intellectuals. What Thomson finds might surprise you: based on her research, there is no single cultural divide or cultural source that can account for the positions that have been adopted. While issues such as religion, homosexuality, sexual conduct, and abortion have figured prominently in public discussion, in fact there is no single thread that unifies responses to each of these cultural dilemmas for any of the writers. Irene Taviss Thomson is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, having taught in the Department of Social Sciences and History at Fairleigh Dickinson University for more than 30 years. Previously, she taught in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University.

Not long ago it would have been an absurd idea to purchase a television, CD or MP3 or DVD player, computer software, or game console with the intention of limiting its capabilities. However, as Raiford Guins demonstrates in Edited Clean Version, today’s media technology is marketed and sold for what it does not contain and what it will not deliver. TVs equipped with V-chips, Internet filters, editing DVD players, clean-version CDs and MP3s, and game consoles with parental control features can block out, monitor, disable, and filter information. As Guins argues in this provocative book, consumers now find themselves in new relationships with their everyday media in which they inscribe their viewing, listening, and playing experiences with self-prescribed and technologically enabled values and morals. Censorial practices are not so much enacted on media by regulatory bodies today as they are in our media technology. According to Guins, these new “control technologies” are designed to embody an ethos of neoliberal governance—through the very media that have been previously presumed to warrant management, legislation, and policing. Repositioned within a discourse of empowerment, security, and choice, the action of regulation, he reveals, has been relocated into the hands of users.

Ends of Empire examines Asian American cultural production and its challenge to the dominant understanding of American imperialism, Cold War dynamics, and race and gender formation.

Jodi Kim demonstrates the degree to which Asian American literature and film critique the record of U.S. imperial violence in Asia and provides a glimpse into the imperial and gendered racial logic of the Cold War. She unfolds this particularly entangled and enduring episode in the history of U.S. global hegemony—one that, contrary to leading interpretations of the Cold War as a simple bipolar rivalry, was significantly triangulated in Asia.

The Asian American works analyzed here constitute a crucial body of what Kim reveals as transnational “Cold War compositions,” which are at once a geopolitical structuring, an ideological writing, and a cultural imagining. Arguing that these works reframe the U.S. Cold War as a project of gendered racial formation and imperialism as well as a production of knowledge, Ends of Empire offers an interdisciplinary investigation into the transnational dimensions of Asian America and its critical relationship to Cold War history.

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